Page 1360 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 9 May 2006
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delay and not to permit the intervention of ordinary constitutional processes to alleviate the danger.
More recently the House of Lords set limits on the detention of foreign nationals suspected of planning the commission of terrorist acts. It said:
Indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial is anathema in any country which observes the rule of law. It deprives the detained person of the protection a criminal trial is intended to afford. Wholly exceptional circumstances must exist before this extreme step can be justified.
The overwhelming lesson from all of these cases is that every limitation on rights must be tested against an unwavering standard of proportionality, that every erosion of liberty must be subject to ongoing judicial oversight and review, and that every extraordinary measure must be confined in time to the particular emergency. For all of these reasons, the bill has been drafted to be consistent with the Human Rights Act. It is why the bill has been drafted to give key decision-making power to the courts and it is why the bill is subject to a five-year sunset clause. This is the requirement that our Human Rights Act sets us and it is the only approach that we can take.
Whether a limit is reasonable or justifiable depends upon whether it is proportionate to achieve an important and significant objective. Every limitation must be necessary and rationally connected to the objective. Every limitation must be the least restrictive in order to achieve the objective, and no limitation can have a disproportionately severe effect on a person. This is the standard of proportionality which is in the government’s bill. We do not accept that people should be detained without sound justification and as a last resort. We do not accept that children should be subjected to preventative detention and we do not accept that the privacy of legal contact should be easily breached.
The government considers this legislation to be model law. We have not relied on a single template. We have used all available resources. I would particularly like to thank the scrutiny of bills committee for preparing their report on this legislation and I welcome the committee’s assessment that the bill fulfils an important and significant objective to protect the community and that the measures adopted are rationally connected to that objective.
Some of the issues raised by the committee’s report would improve the bill. We have the opportunity to make some of those changes now, and I would like to foreshadow some minor amendments that will be dealt with during the detail stage. The amendments are a direct response to some of the queries raised by the committee. They clarify aspects of the legislation but make no real substantive policy change. I table the following paper:
Supplementary explanatory statement to the government amendments.
I would now like to turn to the criticism made by the opposition in relation to this bill. Primarily their key criticism is that it is not nationally consistent, it is not the same as all the other jurisdictions, and therefore it opens up the territory to some higher level of threat. The government does not accept this argument because, first of all, there is no national or uniform template for counter-terrorism legislation in this nation. The COAG agreement does not establish uniform provisions. It does not establish template
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